There may be a time and a place for everything. The difficulty is figuring out when and where.

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

In Which Crazy Has Visions of Strange Bridget-Jones-Esque Marker-Marks on Her Body

So I went to my gym today for the first time in, lo, many moons. Before I get to the substantive part of this post, let me note that I really like my gym, especially during the off hours. It's filled with old people and out-of-shape people. And everybody is really nice.

But so anyway, it had been so many moons since I'd been to the gym that a vulture-like trainer swooped down upon me while I was on the treadmill, making all manner of promises about results and offering me a free appointment. Now, I've always resisted the trainer thing. Part of this was just my own independent nature (I am a person who wrote a dissertation in the humanities after all, and that probably indicates a certain amount of resistance to playing nicely with others and/or asking for help with things), but part of it has been that if I actually took the trainer step I'd have to a) allow somebody other than the doctor know how much I weigh, as well as b) measure the squishy bits of me that I'd really rather not know the measurements for. In other words, as much as I think I've historically been pretty healthy in my attitudes about weight and my body (I've never been a crash-dieter, I do recognize the health value of exercise and of keeping weight under control, and I've never felt particularly badly about my body), I still have weird weight-related baggage that I don't like to let see the light of day.

At any rate, the trainer guy, while vulture-like, was nice, and so I agreed to meet with him tomorrow. I mean, what do I have to lose, really? And apparently he has a friend who does the nutrition side of things and he's going to set me up with a free diet plan as well. So. I don't really like the fact that I've agreed to do this, and I anticipate that this is going to lead to the vulture-like trainer trying to con me into actually paying for a personal trainer, which I don't really want to do, but perhaps going through even just this one appointment will help me to a) get over some of my weird weight-related shame, and b) to actually get to a goal weight over the next six months. It also will help me to meet the weight challenge that FB set for me to achieve by January and thus to be able to show him that I'm a force to be reckoned with, which I'll admit, was one of the things on my mind as I sweatily agreed to tomorrow's appointment.

5 comments:

I have used trainers a few times in my life and have LOVED it each time. It's probably the competitor in me, but I enjoyed having someone push me, teach me new things, encourage me, and in each case I was in a situation where I was never pushed past my comfort point. The workouts are also more interesting so I find I enjoy them more (and then learned how to make my individual workouts more interesting too).